Edgardo Meléndez, The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City

Reviewed By Kenneth Donovan

The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City
by Edgardo Meléndez
Bucknell University Press
November 2022, 240 pp.

New York City newspapers declared a crisis in 1947. Throughout the year, article after article in outlets ranging from the mainstream New York Times to the tabloid daily PM, warned city residents of the scourge of Puerto Rican migration threatening to overtake the city. As presented by the city’s print media, a backward people from an impoverished, overpopulated island, were bringing a host of problems to the city, among them disease, sloth, crime, and overcrowding. The “Puerto Rican Problem” had been born.

This so-called “problem” and the policy reactions it provoked in both New York City and San Juan is the subject of Edgardo Meléndez’s The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City. Covering roughly a decade and a half, from the media construction of the “problem” in 1947 to the early 1960s, when it “entered American academia and cultural constructs,” (8) the book seeks to address the “emergence, evolution, and consequences” of this “racist and nativist” reaction towards Puerto Rican migrants (3). In doing so, Meléndez uncovers some of the forces that have distinguished Puerto Rican migrants’ incorporation into American life and continue to shape American perceptions of the island.

One of the book’s thematic strands concerns the production of knowledge about Puerto Ricans. The “Puerto Rican Problem” begins by methodically detailing the fabrication of the “problem” in the New York print media. No less than forty newspaper articles decrying the supposedly overwhelming influx of Puerto Ricans to the city ran in the first six months of 1947. These articles consistently overestimated the number of migrants while painting them as “alien” and “unassimilable.” Claims that Puerto Rican migrants came to the city to draw on welfare benefits were particularly popular. At times, the hysteria over Puerto Ricans surfaced in publications across the country, from the Miami Herald to Newsweek to Reader’s Digest. These claims came amidst a new wave of Puerto Rican migration to New York. The city’s Puerto Rican community was well-established by World War II, but between 1945 and 1960, approximately half a million Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States mainland. An overwhelmingly majority of these migrants settled in New York City, with the city’s Puerto Rican population growing from 65,000 in 1945 to 600,000 in 1960 (8).

Though the media established the initial framework for viewing Puerto Ricans as a problem, two subsequent studies sought to respond to the hysteria, as Meléndez details in an early chapter in the text. One was conducted by New York City’s Welfare Council due to pervasive concerns about Puerto Ricans drawing on welfare. Meléndez credits the second study, conducted by Columbia University and published in 1950 as The Puerto Rican Journey, as one which would shape both public policy and studies in years to come. In general, these studies offered a corrective to the media campaign, emphasizing that Puerto Rican residents of the city were generally hard working, skilled workers, and did not overly draw on welfare.

Much of the remainder of the book is concerned with how governmental administrations in both New York City and Puerto Rico reacted to the “problem.” Over the course of four chapters, special attention is paid to the four joint “migration conferences” held by the two governments; the establishment of the Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs in New York City; a foray into Cold War politics amidst the 1949 NYC mayoral election, in which progressive Congressman Vito Marcantonio was a contender; and the disbanding of the Mayor’s Committee in favor of a more general Committee on Human Rights. Through all these events Meléndez emphasizes the participation of Puerto Rico’s government in the internal politics of New York City. Rather than turning to home-grown leaders from within El Barrio regarding the needs of the population, New York City officials continually pressed the administration in San Juan to solve the “problem,” generally by encouraging migrants to move elsewhere in the United States. For its part, San Juan’s government actively inserted itself into New York City politics, most clearly in the 1949 mayoral campaign when, concerned about the attempts to link Puerto Ricans with communism, administration figures actively campaigned against Vito Marcantonio.

Meléndez returns to the knowledge production theme in the final chapter, analyzing how the remnants of the “Puerto Rican problem” influenced perceptions of Puerto Ricans in other American cities, sociological discourse, and popular culture. Most attention in the chapter is devoted to the Broadway and Hollywood hit West Side Story [which Meléndez playfully notes “apparently, no discussion of Puerto Ricans…can end without” (179)]. It is there that Meléndez sees the “Puerto Rican Problem” continuing its work, as the “play and film reproduced” (179) negative stereotypes about Puerto Ricans and the island of Puerto Rico itself.

The Puerto Rican Problem remains focused throughout on the people and organizations that had the power to shape discourse and policy surrounding Puerto Rican migration to the city. Collections from the Puerto Rican General Archives and the Governor Luis Muñoz Marín Foundation bring a strong sense of San Juan’s political priorities to the work. Through those sources Meléndez provides a detailed reconstruction of the various migration conferences and San Juan’s intervention in New York City politics. As for the New York City side of migration politics, Meléndez draws on the papers of various mayoral administrations located in the New York City municipal archives.

Largely absent from The Puerto Rican Problem are perspectives or reactions from within New York City’s Puerto Rican community. While the chapter on the construction of the “problem” includes perspectives from El Mundo, the “island’s leading newspaper” at the time, Meléndez notes that the paper was “representative of the insular elite” (36). To be sure, El Mundo challenged the New York media’s portrayal of the city’s Puerto Rican residents, and its inclusion serves to highlight the perspective of Puerto Rican leadership on the island, but I was also left wondering how, if at all, La Prensa, New York’s leading Spanish language newspaper at the time, weighed in.

Similarly, New York-based Puerto Rican leaders surface only occasionally and briefly, such as when community members sought to elevate Antonia Pantoja to the Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs. The few pages that Melendez does devote to the rise of homegrown leadership mainly serve to further illustrate the role the government in San Juan played in New York City. Homegrown political organization is presented as a turning point, a development which “led to the diminished influence and presence of the Puerto Rican government in city politics,” (168) and largely brings Meléndez’s narrative to a close. While greater attention to political organizing within the city would have been welcome, Meléndez is up front about this elision, stating in the introduction that The Puerto Rican Problem “will not provide a comprehensive look at…community activism and organizational development” in the 1950s (11).

At times I would have appreciated more context surrounding the “Puerto Rican problem.” Given its timing and passing references to white flight and urban renewal, I found myself wondering how the “problem” interacted with the emerging forces of disinvestment and urban decline in New York City. Likewise, in the final chapter, Meléndez briefly suggests the “Puerto Rican problem” was foundational to the development of the “Culture of Poverty” concept that was emerging in American sociological discourse in the 1960s. Thus, he argues, did Puerto Rican affairs help influence the ideology behind the 1960s War on Poverty. Given the argument that the War on Crime grew out of the War on Poverty, as well as the expanding literature on the carceral state, a deeper exploration of these links would have been worth pursuing. [1]

Overall, Meléndez’s work provides a detailed and thorough account of migration politics in postwar New York City. It addresses a period in the New York’s Puerto Rican history—the 1950s—that has received less attention, sandwiched between thorough accounts of the community’s formation and the political action of the 1960s. Perhaps most significantly, the book sheds light on how ideas about Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico itself were constructed and incorporated into public policy and popular culture. According to Meléndez, those ideas have had staying power. As the island of Puerto Rico faces ongoing challenges in the present, from crippling debt to the privatization of its electric power, it seems that, to quote Melendez, “the ‘Puerto Rican Problem’ has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape” (195).

Kenneth M. Donovan is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stony Brook University. His research explores the formation and growth of Long Island’s Latino communities.

[1] Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

[2] On the formation of New York’s Puerto Rican community, see Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010). Puerto Rican political action has recently been addressed by Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).